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Johannesburg-based occupational health, safety and environmental (HSE) risk- management company NOSA recently launched an HSE e-learning course that focuses on the mining industry, namely Samtrac for Mining, which complements the general industry course launched in May last year.

Samtrac has been NOSA’s flagship training product since the 1960s and about 40 000 students a year receive training through NOSA’s courses.

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NOSA says its online courses will add value to the skills sets of students and employees where the aspects of health, safety and the environment are key.

NOSA commercial director Roland Glass tells Engineering News that the company has been working extensively on researching and developing online training courses, or Samtrac e-learning, to ensure that it is well positioned in the market and that it meets the stringent demands of the industries at which the courses are aimed.

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Samtrac GM Stuart Hill says Samtrac e-learning offers courses that have been developed to meet the demand from multinational companies to set a single standard of training across their global operations.

He says NOSA has invested significantly in the development of Samtrac’s e-learning training courses, which will enable students to study in their own time and to select courses in multiple languages.

Added to this, environmental, health and safety consultancy Enhesa provides country-specific legislation for Samtrac’s courses, which enables Samtrac to provide training specifically suited to the regulations and standards set by the countries in which students will work.

Further, NOSA’s training is well acknowledged in South Africa, with many HSE job specifications requiring Samtrac as a prerequisite.

The Samtrac e-learning courses comprise eight modules and students receive a certificate on successful completion of the final examination. Samtrac is accredited internationally by the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management, as well as locally by the South African Qualifications Authority, while the course is a National Qualifications Framework Level 5 training course.

Samtrac provides students with a study kit, which includes hardcopy material to complement the e-learning, while full-time assistance is also provided for all students enrolled in the courses. “The e-learning content is designed to be engaging to assist in keeping the students focused on the course content,” says Hill.

NOSA uses the examination centre services of com- puter-based testing solutions company Pearson VUE, which has more than 5 000 exam centres worldwide, to conduct the final written examinations.

Miracles SoftwareApart from the recently launched online courses, NOSA also offers its Miracles software package. It is a comprehensive risk-management solution, developed to reduce paperwork and manual forms of data capturing in risk management, while streamlining health, safety and risk-management activities as well as real-time data consolidation on various organisational hierarchy levels.

NOSA technology division manager Marthinus Parau says Miracles helps in the prevention of incidents and accidents within the work environment by sending out automatic alerts to key users, which is not possible with manual systems.

Miracles provides a complete management solution for all health, safety, environment and quality aspects, he adds.

The program consists of nine modules that communicate with one another, resulting in comprehensive reporting and determining of trends and analysis.

The key element of Miracles is the risk profile module, which has preloaded sets of hazards risks and consequences to ensure comprehensive and precise risk assessments are automatically populated, thereby guaranteeing accurate risk ratings.

The software program notifies predetermined parties of the status of controls such as overdue or upcoming equipment service/maintenance intervals.

Another key feature of Miracles is its incident register, onto which all incidents and nonconformances, such as lost-time injuries, equipment failures and spillages, are logged. “Once the information has been submitted to the system, it automatically sends notifications to a predefined group of people. Following this, an investigation of the entire incident can take place and the investigation can be logged as progress is made with the investigation,” says Parau.

All remedial and preventive actions are also logged, which assists the responsible person in the prevention of future incidents and accidents. These recommendations can be forwarded to various personnel in charge of incident management.

Further, a company’s staff complement can also be logged onto the system, with aspects such as notifications of when training expires or has to be renewed, and refresher courses, set up to enable personnel or human resources managers to plan for these events. This also ensures that all personnel training and health and safety obligations are up to date.

NOSA product tester Eugene de Kock tells Engineering News that the IMS, however, is a Web-based platform for organisations to manage all safety-, health-, environment-, quality-, liability - and security-related incidents or nonconformances.

“The major benefit of the IMS is that clients can access the system from anywhere in the world by simply using a website URL address and login information,” he says.

The IMS consolidates incident data from all levels of the organisation into one database, enabling the user to analyse trends on different levels of the organisation.

The IMS is compatible with tablets and smartphones.

The system features six languages, allowing for communication among users of these languages to engage fully with one another regarding incident reports, as the system translates data across the range of the languages offered.

The system can also be customised to enable individual users to prioritise certain aspects of the system’s dashboard to suit their management tasks.